Skype Inadvertently Reveals Upcoming App for iPad

Posted by Carter Dotson on June 27th, 2011

The iPad has been out for almost 15 months, and has proven to be extremely popular. However, some notable services have yet to release their apps on the iPad, even to this day. Skype has been one of these notable services, with only an iPhone/iPod touch-optimized app. While it works fine on the iPad for calling, and the experience with using multitasking is virtually the same, text chatting suffers in particular with using the app on the iPad. This particular aspect of Skype usage has been possible only through third party instant messaging apps.

However, it appears as if Skype has inadvertently revealed that their absence on the iPad is about to come to an end. Skype posted a video to YouTube of their iPad app, which was then made private, but not before someone made a screen recording of the video. The video demonstration in particular shows off the video calling features of the app between two people, with the ability to switch between front and rear cameras mid-call like FaceTime. As well, there's the ability to do text chats mid-call via a pop-up display, view a list of recent chats on a sidebar, and view contacts by picture, similar to viewing photos in Photos.app.

As well, TUAW was able to speak with Rick Osterloh, Skype's Vice President of Consumer and Product Design, who confirmed the authenticity of the video and upcoming release of the app. The reason why an iPad app is finally coming is because of the iPad 2's cameras and video calling abilities; they were fine with having just the iPhone app running on iPad on the iPad before. With the impending release of this Skype app, this should hopefully motivate other popular services to start releasing iPad apps. Facebook, the world turns its lonely eyes to you!

Source: The Next Web